Edward Burtynsky

Possibly the best thing Pulse has going for it is their VIP lounge. Set at the back of their tent on the beach, this balcony gives collectors an incredible view of the ocean. When I visited met two friends who had been there for most of the day and were deliriously happy. That’s what you want.

The new tent is a much-needed departure from the Ice Palace, which thanks to a few rocky years of leadership, many now associate with leaks, poor exhibitors and poor sales.

After a foggy morning the sun has come out. That’s great news for our friends at Flux Factory who are making the last preparations for their benefit tonight. We can’t wait to see them there, and we hope to see you too!

Edward Burtynsky’s Watermark has been awarded $100,000, the Toronto Film Critic Association’s top prize. [BlouinArtInfo]

A delicious quote from Louise Blouin, the founder of BlouinArtInfo, who claims the sudden axing of roughly 25 freelancers and failure to pay outstanding bills has to do with the company’s massive growth. “The company is not having money problems. The company is a company that is growing and has restructured the editorial to up the editorial, according to new management, and that’s it. And we have our business that is really growing.” It goes on. Later she tells us that her company has upwards of 3,000 products, and offers the rationale of a crack addict to explain how she came to that number. [Gallerist]

The National Endowment for the Arts has avoided major cuts this year with the new appropriations bill. They’re slated to receive $146.02 million, only a hair less than 2013’s allocation of $146.26 million. [Hyperallergic]

Speaking of the appropriations bill, the New York Times Editorial Board congratulates Congress for doing their job, while penning some joyfully snarky jabs at Republican victories within the bill. My favorite comes after complaining about coal companies that will be allowed to continue dumping toxic waste into streams: “Also included is the ridiculous provision that prevents enforcement of new light-bulb standards, a triumph for those who consider incandescent lights a symbol of freedom.” [The New York Times]

The last several years have been bizarrely good for the email-epistolary novel. [Rhizome]

“A portable climate.” That’s what Ralph Waldo Emerson called coal. “Every basket is power and civilization,” he wrote in 1860. Coal is not only a portable climate but “it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted,” Emerson added, noting “a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta.”

Writing 100 years later, Thomas McGrath contrasts coal fire to wood fire in his poem “A Coal Fire in Winter.” With a coal fire, there is “[s]omething old and tyrannical burning there.” This is “heat / From the time before there was fire.” Coal, compressed plant matter accumulated over 100,000 years, is the legacy of a “sunken kingdom” and its flames are “carbon serpents of bituminous gardens.”

Coal—as fuel, as fossil, as material, as metaphor, as “black gold,” as historical force—is the starting point of Manifesta 9, situated in the main building of the former Waterschei mining facility in Genk, Belgium.